Breaking down the roots of school segregation

The 24-page article, written last year, grew out of Graham’s experience in Professor Samantha Barbas’ class on 20^th century American legal history. “I came into the semester knowing I wanted to write about this,” she says, “but my focus did not start out as narrow as it is in the article.” Graham, a Queens native and a graduate of its public school system, zeroed in on New York City schools as emblematic of the stubborn problem of school segregation nationwide.

Professor Heather Abraham is Graham’s supervising attorney in the law school’s Civil Rights and Transparency Clinic, where Graham is working on segregation-related impact litigation, representing a group of civil rights nonprofit organizations. “When Deja approached me about this topic, I was thrilled,” Abraham says. “Regrettably, segregation in schools, neighborhoods and throughout our society remains a timely public challenge. Her passion, based on life experience and her career interests, shines through in her research and writing.”

Graham, who’s now editor in chief of the Buffalo Human Rights Law Review, took time out from her 3L responsibilities to talk about the article and its import.

How did your personal experience in the New York City public school system inform your work on this article?

It was very jarring doing the research, because there were a lot of things I didn’t know. Hindsight is 20/20, and now I recognize that in my high school—which had 3,000 students and only one white student—something was wrong. New York City is the worst place to attend school as a Black person, in terms of segregation, and the second-worst as a Latinx person. The idea that school segregation is still occurring is not widely recognized.

You write about the downstream effects of de facto school segregation, such as the lack of diversity in professions including law. Why did you think it was important to highlight these effects?

Why is it that only five percent of attorneys are Black? I get annoyed at hearing that question. It seems like the why is pretty obvious. School segregation is just one of many reasons why there’s a lack of representation in the legal field. You are more likely to obtain the education level that your parents obtained, so if the cycle continues, the higher the degree, the fewer Black and Latinx people.

Unless a wrench gets thrown into the cycle, it will never be fixed. Being in law school has made it clear to me that I defied the odds. Even outside of race, there’s a difference between a law student whose family has financial resources and one who has to work while in law school. There are so many layers to it.

You argue that only the federal government, not the states or the cities themselves, is in a position to eradicate school segregation. What could it do to accomplish this?

It’s a large issue in cities across the country. We need a more widespread way to address the problem, such as an act of Congress, to put forth a good-faith effort to try to address school segregation.

In doing the research for this it was clear that the responsibility has always been on the students to pick themselves by their bootstraps, but there’s no acknowledgment of the things that stand in their way and make it harder to succeed. I just wanted to put it on people’s radar that this is an issue.